Karl Valentin

Karl Valentin (born Valentin Ludwig Fey, 4 June 1882 - 9 February 1948) was a Bavarian comedian who had significant influence on German Weimar culture. He starred in many silent films in the 1920s and was sometimes called the "Charlie Chaplin of Germany". His work had an essential influence on artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Loriot and Helge Schneider.

Valentin was born in Munich into a reasonably well-off middle-class family; his father had a partnership in a furniture-transport business. He first worked as a carpenter's apprentice, experience that proved useful in constructing his sets and props. In 1902 he began his comic career, enrolling for three months at a variety school in Munich. He soon performed regularly in the cabarets and beerhalls of Munich, developing a reputation for short comic routines delivered in a strong Bavarian dialect, usually with his female partner, Liesl Karlstadt.

In 1923 Valentin appeared in the slapstick film Mysteries of a Barbershop, with a script by Bertolt Brecht and direction by Erich Engel; it has come to be recognised as one of the hundred most important films in German filmmaking history. Brecht regularly watched Valentin perform and compared him to Chaplin, and Valentin's idea of applying chalk to actors' faces became significant in the development of Brecht's conception of epic theatre. Considered, alongside Karl Kraus, a master of gallows humour, Valentin was a linguistic anarchist whose comedy centred on wordplay and misunderstanding. He died in Planegg in 1948 from pneumonia, and in 1959 the Valentin-Museum was established in the Isartor in Munich.